Marianne Keating: The Ocean Between

This new artist-directed programme aims to support artists to pursue their current research interests and connect with audiences through a collaboration with the Crawford Art Gallery, it’s site, collection and location. The programme aims to platform the development of an artist’s career and its often intrinsic relationship with the institution.

Marianne Keating’s current work addresses the hidden histories of the Irish diaspora in the Caribbean, through narratively reconstructing this history through its archival traces. Her multi-media installation will focus on the movement of the Irish indentured labourers and emigrants in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to Barbados and Jamaica and their resulting legacies in the contemporary Caribbean. Tracing the migration of the Irish from ports including Cork, Limerick and Belfast, Keating’s project will explore the eighteenth-century role of the Customs House - where the Crawford Art Gallery is now located - to determine new narratives around the Irish diaspora in response to the dominant ‘master narratives’ of Western nationhood, rewriting the histories of the dominated ‘other’.

Marianne Keating is an Irish artist currently based between Ireland and London. Recent exhibitions include New Contemporaries, South London Gallery and as part of the Liverpool Biennial; Arrivants: Art and Migration in the Anglophone Caribbean World, Barbados Museum and Historical Society, Bridgetown, Barbados; Between Us And, Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2018) and forthcoming exhibitions include Another Land: Experimental Visualisations of Place, Stanley Picker Gallery/ Kingston Museum, London (2019).